The case of the reappearing rubbish

Gotta love "Wheelie-bins"! I can remember our excitement (in Western Australia) when we got rid of our old metal bin because the local council had provided us with a shiny new wheelie bin. (We were devastated shortly after when the local hoons took it in a drive-by heist, and ran it alongside their speeding car, so far and so fast that its little wheels fell off.)

In China, living in a sizable apartment complex, we were a little startled to find that a swing-top kitchen tidy bin was the receptacle provided for hundreds of apartment dwellers to deposit their household trash. (Especially as the plumbing was such that you could not flush even the tiniest amount of paper - no getting away with that at all, any mistakes and it would return to haunt you until you fished it back out or got to work with the plunger ... So there was a fair bit of rubbish from everyone's apartment every day.)

However, it hardly ever happened that there was a bag already in the little bin when we added ours. The rubbish bags barely hit the bottom of the bin before one of the little tidy-up people would shuffle up and sort through it. Everything was recycled. Different people collected different parts - some went for plastic, some for paper, some for tiny things like pop-sticks and twist-ties. The favourite was, of course, plastic bottles. In fact if we were walking the street with a half-drunk bottle of water, soft-drink or ice tea, we would soon find at least one person stalking us, waiting for us to drink up and discard the valuable bottle. The bottles could be sold for 0.1 yuan, and ten of those would buy a decent feed on the street.

So, I'm sure I hear you asking ... How is it done here in this fair city of Istanbul? "Just leave it at the edge of the street", is what we were told. And sure enough, you see piles of rubbish bags heaped in the gutters by the narrow brick street every day. Ghastly? Well, it is a bit. But there is one rule, you only put out rubbish at night.

As soon as the sun starts to go down, the rubbish starts appearing - not in bins, just untidy heaps of plastic shopping bags and the like. And shortly after that the scurrying starts, the little people with carts come by and pick it all up. They don't just come past once, if we miss the first rush we can still put out our stuff and it will magically disappear.

We have a big bin in our kitchen, with a big, tough garbage bag in it, so we only need to put out our rubbish every week or so. But years of marriage and bin disasters have taught us that you don't put food scraps in a bin that is going to sit there for a week ... especially when the food is fish! So every day we take the scraps from our daily fish, and wrap it tightly in a plastic bag, and then usually I deposit it on the edge of the street as I head out to my evening classes.

A couple of times we made a mistake, and took the bag down too early, and so we hung it in a nearby tree and returned later to move it to the street. There are no rats in Istanbul, as far as I can tell - but there are millions of cats ... so you can imagine their excitement at finding a bag of fish-scraps dangling in a tree! Only once did they succeed in shredding the bag and spreading yummy, smelly stuff all over themselves and the path. (I could tell which cat it was, he was licking himself for hours!)

We learnt! We didn't do that again.

The two young ladies, our colleagues upstairs, not being in a marriage relationship, are still learning about bin etiquette and bin strategies. They still hold to the fond belief that when you put something in the bin it is "Gone Forever"! Some chicken scraps thus disposed of came back to haunt them, until Stephanie in desperation (and I'm not sure, but I'm guessing she was in her pajamas) grabbed the bags, took them downstairs, and deposited them right outside the front door on the ground.

"Here kitty, kitty ..." We returned from a shopping outing to find a maelstrom of cats, some devouring, some washing themselves, and some just spreading the joy. It was way too late in the day to do anything about the mess, I figured one of the little clean-up people with rubber gloves and a broom would fix things.

The next morning as we opened our apartment door to go to work, there was a neat pile of rubbish bags waiting for us, pressing up against our door. Someone had, in fact, cleaned up the mess, and decided we were to blame!

We mentioned this to the girls upstairs. They have learnt too now.